How to break everything electronic

For the first time in my life, I managed to make enough money writing to buy myself a new computer (mostly because I didn’t have to buy food with the money). I didn’t need a new computer. I have a perfectly awesome desktop computer which has served me well (an iMac): namely, it enabled my writing, which enabled my ability to buy its smaller and sleeker sibling-a MacBook Air.

The laptop is incredible. I love it. It’s going to help me write more stuff, more often, more places, which is cool.

What’s not cool is the hideous technology fail in which I unwittingly embroiled my husband and I this weekend. See, I’ve been using computers since 1987. This means that not only do I have a million email accounts, I also have two Apple IDs. This has been driving me crazy for years. This weekend we tried to merge them (an impossibility, but moving all my shit to one iCloud/Apple ID was possible). It all went pretty smoothly, until our calendars refused to share.

My husband, who is an extremely awesome dude, spent several hours on the phone with Apple’s customer support. Now, you must understand, my husband DESIGNS software/hardware for a living. Usually, he makes electronic devices beg for mercy when they give us trouble, but this problem refused to go belly up. After hours on the phone and countless insane attempts at stabbing in the dark, we left the Apple folks stymied. They think it is a bug in iCloud and have passed on all our data to their engineers who will debug the issue.

Let me reiterate: I broke Apple’s iCloud.

They will be calling us back after they reprogram the world.

Anyway, through all this, I have to admit, Apple’s support was top-notch. They didn’t assume we had no idea how to turn on our stuff. They didn’t assume we broke our stuff by pouring coffee on it. They ASKED MY HUSBAND for advice about password storage. So, you know, that was kind of funny.